Area 51: The Grail-5 (9 page)

As soon as he was clear of the runway and had some altitude, Jimsar kicked in the afterburner, accelerating his fighter to Mach 2. He checked his radar to make sure his wingman, Captain Hanxia, was right behind him, then followed instructions as the lieutenant vectored them toward the bogey infiltrating Chinese airspace from the west, out of Afghani airspace. Jimsar knew that meant it could be coming from anywhere, as the anarchy in that neighboring country left it wide open for overflights.

The bogey flew along the northern foothills of the Himalayas as the two fighters closed the gap. The lieutenant reported the intruder making a course adjustment to the north, over the Tarim Basin while also dropping in altitude, apparently trying to escape the detection of radar. But by now, Jimsar's own radar had picked up the strange image from his higher altitude. The intruder was fifty miles straight ahead.

Standing orders dictated that the pilots aim their air-to-air missiles at any intruder and, once they received a lock-on signal from the radar homing device, to fire.

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There was to be no reconsidering those orders, no initiative displayed, no hesitation. The Chinese military believed in one thing above all else—obedience.

When the Chinese bought the Su-27 Flanker aircraft from the Russians in 1992, they'd also purchased 144 AA-10 air-to-air missiles to arm the craft with. Jimsar knew that renaming the missiles R27 didn't change the country of origin for the weapons. Of course, he had never uttered that thought aloud.

The Chinese government was desperately afraid of the corrupting influence of foreigners, yet it didn't draw the line at buying their weapons.

At twenty-five miles, Jimsar received lock-on confirmation that the on-board radar had acquired the target. Still out of visual range, he and his wingman armed their missiles.

Twenty miles and still closing, Jimsar flipped open the small red cover over the fire button. He thought briefly of the Russians downing KAL Flight 700 and the American navy ship shooting down the Iranian airliner. He knew if he did not fire there was a good chance he would be shot down on approach back to Kashi airfield by his own anti-aircraft batteries. His only other option was to try to fly to freedom, but he had a limited amount of fuel on board—not enough to reach a decent airfield to land the plane, and without the prize of the plane he doubted he would be granted asylum in any of the countries within reach. Also, if he fled, he had been told in no uncertain terms that his family would be sent to prison for the rest of their lives.

Jimsar pressed down, and a missile leapt from beneath each wing. Seeing that, his wingman followed suit and four missiles raced forward at four times the speed of sound toward the target.

Jimsar watched the action play out on his display.

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"We have multiple hits," he announced, watching the trail of his two missiles abruptly disappear. This was followed by the second two at a slightly further location, which was strange, but Jimsar didn't report that.

"Confirm wreckage location," the lieutenant ordered.

In the time it had taken the missiles to fly twenty miles, the jets had flown ten. The short conversation at Mach 2 closed the gap another five miles.

The Flankers dipped down and slowed until they were cruising at a relatively slow five hundred miles an hour, less than eight hundred feet above the desert floor.

Jimsar loved flying close to the ground, the terrain flashing by, emphasizing the speed and power of the jet. His eyes were glued forward. A tall sand dune over a hundred feet high rapidly approached.

For a second, Jimsar froze in shock as the strangest thing he'd ever seen rose from behind the sand dune. At his speed all he had was a glimpse, then he was by, but there was no doubt of the form—a dragon, open mouth pointing directly at them!

"Break and circle!" Jimsar ordered.

There was no response from Hanxia.

"Break and circle." Jimsar already had the Flanker in a steep left-hand turn.

"Roger, breaking and circling right," Hanxia replied in a shaky voice.

As his hands worked the controls, Jimsar replayed the image in his mind. "It was metal," he said out loud. He forced himself to snap back to reality.

"Captain!" Jimsar ordered. "We're going to circle back. Do you understand?

Over."

"Yes, sir."

"It's a machine," Jimsar said as he leveled off, heading back toward the dragon. He checked his display. Nothing. The dragon had to be using the sand dune to

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mask its radar signature. "Keep your eyes open," he warned Hanxia as the dune came into view five miles ahead and below.

"Sir, I think—" There was a loud burst of static, a scream inside of the static, then silence.

Jimsar's action was instinctive. He rolled the Flanker hard right, dropped altitude, punched in afterburners, and pointed the nose almost straight up.

His back slammed into the seat from both the acceleration and vertical attitude.

His head twisted and turned as he searched the sky from this unique perspective. He saw the dragon racing up, no visible means of propulsion, three miles away and closing both horizontally and vertically.

Jimsar pushed the stick over, going from a climb to a twisting dive that put him head-on with the dragon, now less than five seconds away. He pressed the trigger for the 30mm cannon and felt the plane shudder as it spewed eight-inch-long bullets. Every fifth round was a tracer and his hand twitched on the stick, bringing the fiery rope of bullets right into the chest of the dragon as it raced toward him.

A line of light leapt from the dragon's mouth, and came back at Jimsar's plane as fast as his bullets were going the other way. He released the trigger and rolled left into a steep dive, narrowly avoiding the beam.

He kept his afterburners on and used the descent to add to his speed before leveling off at one thousand feet and almost seventeen thousand miles an hour in speed. He headed directly for the airfield at Kashi, the battle over.

Not only did Jimsar accept he was overmatched, his fuel gauges were dangerously low because of the limited fuel he had been given.

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THE GIZA PLATEAU, EGYPT

Duncan ran her hand along the top of the Ark, feeling the thin wires coiled into the lid. At first she had thought they were artwork, but when she tugged on them, they came out. Three long filaments of metal, ending in what appeared to be a small rose-shaped object about half an inch across, each made of a different material.

She looked at the wires for a short time, something nagging at her, as if she had seen this before. She reached up and took the crown off her head. On each of the three bands of metal that comprised the crown was a small indentation, the inverse of the objects on the end of each line.

She took each lead and placed it against the indent on the band made of the same material. The first two clicked firmly in place. She hesitated on the third, not sure what it would bring forth, but she had an overwhelming urge to move forward. She pushed the last one in place and the lid glowed brightly, enveloping her in a golden light, but that was all.

Duncan lifted the crown and set it on her head.

She gasped as she "saw" the Giza Plateau from a bird's-eye view, in the midst of a lush, green land, but with no pyramid or Sphinx on its surface. The vision shifted and she saw a Talon spacecraft on the plateau, its long, lean form against the blue sky. The Talon fired a beam down into the rock of the plateau, burning deep

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into it. Another Talon appeared, the Black Sphinx just below it, held in a golden field propagated from the tip of the craft. The Black Sphinx was lowered into the hole that had been cut. Men and women were now getting off the first craft carrying supplies.

Duncan was overwhelmed, her mind receiving input faster than she could process it. What she was experiencing was more than a vision. She knew things about what she was seeing. It was as if the Ark was giving her information in the form of memories.

She reached up and ripped the crown off her head, then collapsed next to the Ark, her body shutting down to protect itself.

VICINITY EASTER ISLAND

It was the worst defeat the US Navy had suffered since Pearl Harbor. The Nimitz-class carrier USS Washington, the pride of the Pacific fleet, was lost.

As was the USS Springfield, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine.

The loss of the carrier and its battle group to the unknown force on Easter Island had effectively gutted Task Force 78's power, as the surviving ships'—two guided missiles cruisers, three destroyers, two frigates, another LA-class sub, and two supply ships—primary mission was to guard the carrier.

The arrival of the Washington's sister ship, the USS Stennis, and her battle group, had restored the combat effectiveness of the fleet that now steamed two hundred miles north of Easter Island, with the new title of Task Force 79, under the control of the commander of the Stennis, Captain Robinette.

The orders to sit tight and do nothing didn't sit well with Robinette, nor the men and women he

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commanded. When he received a mission asking for a SEAL team to infiltrate Easter Island with the dual mission of reconnaissance and rescue, all he cared was that it had sufficient clearance, and ST-8 was the highest possible. He knew that he should check in with Pacific Fleet Command at Pearl to confirm, but he chose not to, for fear they would countermand the order. Instead, he personally took the tasking to the commander of the SEAL team billeted aboard his ship.

AREA 51, NEVADA

Turcotte had been pacing in the hallway outside the conference room for the past hour after grabbing a quick meal in the base's cafeteria. Yakov sat on a hard plastic chair just outside the door, a bottle of vodka between his knees.

He'd made a big show of getting the bottle from Quinn, but Turcotte noted that the level had dropped less than a half inch in the past hour, barely a wetting of the lips for the Russian.

Turcotte was ready to go, but the replacements for the men who had been killed had not yet arrived, nor did he have sufficient intelligence on the Giza Plateau to even begin planning a second rescue mission.

Turcotte spotted a familiar face coming out of the room and changed his direction to walk beside Larry Kincaid, the NASA and JPL representative.

Kincaid had a file folder tucked under his arm. "I'm going to get these pictures from Hubble updated."

"Mars?"

Kincaid nodded.

"Cydonia region?" Turcotte narrowed it down to the spot where the Airlia base had been discovered.

"Yep."

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As they reached the end of the hallway, Turcotte put a thick forearm across Kincaid's chest, halting the other man abruptly. "You got a secret or you going to tell me why you're being so quiet?"

Kincaid paused. "No secret." He held up the file. "They're doing something on Mars. I just can't figure out what."

"A weapon?"

Kincaid shook his head angrily. "You military guys— that's all you ever worry about—'is it a weapon?' That's what Majestic spent all those years concerned about: whether the Airlia artifacts could be used as weapons.

Whether the Russians would find an Airlia weapon. And when we did find an Airlia weapon—or I should say the Germans did—we kidnapped it and used it to build a nuclear weapon to kill other humans. But nobody worried about the bigger picture."

"Is that a no?" Turcotte asked, forcing a smile on his face. He'd worked with men under stress before and he knew that things could unravel quickly.

'Too much coffee," Kincaid paused. "I don't know what it is, and I'm having a hell of a hard time getting more information. We're getting the shaft from our own government—they want to pull use of the Hubble from me. What are they going to look at that's more important than alien machines on Mars? We've had our heads in the sand about the aliens forever, and now people want to stick our heads back in there and pretend nothing's changed."

Kincaid took a deep breath before continuing. "I don't know, Mike. They could be uncovering a weapon. Nothing much we can do about it if they are. I would like to at least see what they're doing with the best equipment we have."

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"Talk to Quinn," Turcotte suggested. "He can work some backdoors in the classified world, maybe get you the Hubble back."

"I hope so." Kincaid shoved the door open and went into the Cube. Turcotte spun on his heel and paused. Yakov stood there blocking the corridor.

"Do not be so hard on him. He is out of his depth. Overwhelmed. We all are."

Yakov thumped Turcotte on the chest with a large finger. "Remember what happens to us when we think with this, rather than with this." He pointed at his own head.

"Don't—" Turcotte began, but paused when he saw Professor Mualama standing in the doorway to the conference room. "What is it?"

"I have translated the first two chapters of Burton's manuscript," Mualama said.

"That was quick," Turcotte noted.

"My studies have been very beneficial," Mualama said.

"Right," Turcotte replied, his tone indicating what he thought of Mualama's answer.

Mualama held his hand out for the door. "You'll find it very interesting.

You have to remember that Burton was more known for his translation of others'

writing— like the Kama Sutra or The Thousand and One Nights—than his own writing. This manuscript is all in his words, but it appears a large part of it comes from his translation of documents he discovered."

Turcotte went into the conference room, Yakov following. Quinn went to wake Che Lu.

"By the way," Mualama pointed at a picture tacked to the bulletin board,

"that's Burton."

Turcotte paused in his rush to get to the computer. Burton was a savage-looking man, with scars etched on each cheek, blazing black eyes, and dark skin.

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"He had a spear run through both cheeks when he was attacked at Berbera on his first expedition with Speke," Mualama said.

"Speke?" Turcotte asked.

"John Speke, another English explorer. The two went to Africa several times to search for the source of the Nile," Mualama explained.